Tag: writing

A Test of Three Tales

Just to give people here an idea of what sort of thing they’ll be able to find at AI CENTRAL, I posed three different AI text engines the same very specific challenge: a 2,500-word story in the style of a brilliant author. Bonus points if you can guess which author it was from this excerpt from one of the three entrants:

The Scarlet Visitor

The city of Paradyse rose from the sea like a dream of gold and shadow, its towers clawing at the sky, its streets winding in serpentine coils. Ships from distant lands brought spices, silks, and secrets to its harbors, but none so strange as the vessel that came on the eve of the Festival of Masks.

It was a ship without a name, its sails the color of dried blood, its hull black as a starless night. The dockmaster, a wizened man named Orlan, squinted at it through the salt-haze and crossed himself—though he could not say why. When the gangplank descended, only one figure emerged: a woman wrapped in a scarlet cloak, her face hidden behind a veil of silver lace.

She moved through the city like a whisper, her steps soundless, her presence drawing eyes yet leaving no impression. The people of Paradyse were accustomed to strangeness—this was a city where nobles wore living jewels that whispered secrets, where the dead sometimes walked the markets at dusk—but there was something about her that unsettled even the most jaded souls.

The woman took lodging at the Inn of the Twisted Serpent, a place frequented by those who did not wish to be found. The innkeeper, Madame Vex, was a creature of sharp angles and sharper wits, her fingers adorned with rings that could sting like scorpions. She offered the stranger a room without asking for coin, sensing that some debts were best left unspoken.

“How long will you stay in our fair city?” Madame Vex inquired, her voice like honeyed poison.

The woman lifted her veil just enough to sip her wine. Her lips were the same crimson as her cloak. “Until my business is concluded.”

“And what business is that?”

A smile, fleeting as a knife’s gleam. “The oldest kind.”

And there is a very clear and obvious winner, which may be of interest to some of the writers here. Visit AI CENTRAL to read all three entrants and see the verdict.

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The Vessel of Dreams

Since Neil Gaiman presumably won’t be publishing anything ever again, it falls to AI to imagine what might have been.

The bathtub was a vessel of dreams, a porcelain ship adrift in a sea of steam and possibility. Neil sank into the warm embrace of the water, the world outside dissolving into a haze of muted sounds and soft light. A book rested on the edge of the tub, its pages slightly curled from the humidity, waiting to transport him to realms where gods walked among mortals and shadows held secrets too vast for the daylight. In one hand, he held a cup of tea, its aroma mingling with the scent of lavender bubbles, while the other hand trailed lazily in the water, stirring ripples that danced like fleeting thoughts. This was his sanctuary, a place where stories whispered to him from the edges of his mind, where the mundane melted away, and the extraordinary took root. Sometimes, he would close his eyes and let the water hold him, imagining he was floating through the stars or sinking into the depths of an ancient, forgotten ocean. The bathtub was not just a place to wash away the day; it was a portal, a liminal space where the boundaries between reality and imagination blurred, and where the next story always began.

UPDATE: The musical rendition of this has been released on UATV. It is beautifully… disturbing.

Oh, this bath is a vessel of dreams
Sailing through stars on a whisper of steam
Gods in the water with demons and sin
Let the world wait
Let the stories begin

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The Winds of Winter is Complete

And has been, apparently, for nine years already.

A publishing industry insider has told Fandom Pulse The Winds Of Winter was finished and turned in back in 2016. Epic fantasy fans have all but given up on getting the end of A Song Of Ice And Fire, George R.R. Martin’s epic which sprawled out of control with too many perspective characters where the author wrote himself into a corner. On top of it, Martin himself seems to have completely given up on it and published a very angry rant at fan reaction on his blog this week.

However, an insider told Fandom Pulse the thirteen-years-late book actually was finished in 2016 during the filming of season 6 of A Game Of Thrones. The insider, who we confirmed worked in the publishing industry at big companies, said that they have spoken with editors at both Spectra and Voyager, who are Martin’s publishers in the United Kingdom and the United States, to confirm this, with both having a similar story.

That’s another big scoop for Fandom Pulse, following on the heels of the confirmation of its original reporting about Ark Press being part of Peter Thiel’s new publishing empire. . Apparently the reason The Winds of Winter wasn’t published despite being completed is because Martin withdrew the book after the producers of the TV show criticized the ending, which reportedly is much the same ending that was filmed. It’s also interesting that the first mention of an additional book to follow appears to be around the same time that Martin withdrew the book from his publishers.

If these reports are true, it might explain why the two producers abandoned the production so hastily, and why they pretty much just phoned in that final season. They would have known it was going to be a trainwreck long before they started filming it. It would also explain why Martin apparently has no intention of releasing the book, at least, not while he’s still alive to listen to his former fans castigating his swan song. Of course, if you watched Arkhaven Nights last night, you already know all of this…

So, it would appear that Martin lost his writing fastball even sooner than we thought. As Murakami says, once a writer gets fat, it’s over. I’ll be discussing this on the Darkstream tonight, so if you’re interested, tune in.

UPDATE: Ruh-roh…

“The Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens, Tyrion and Asha, Dany and Daenerys, the dragons and the direwolves, I care about them all,” Martin wrote. “More than you can ever imagine.”

Dany is Daenerys. But apparently George doesn’t realize that now.

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Everybody Hates George

George RR Martin throws himself a pity party:

I know, I know. Some of you will just be pissed off by this, as you are by everything I announce here that is not about Westeros or THE WINDS OF WINTER. You have given up on me, or on the book. I will never finish WINDS, If I do, I will never finish A DREAM OF SPRING. If I do, it won’t be any good. I ought to get some other writer to pinch hit for me… I am going to die soon anyway, because I am so old. I lost all interest in A Song of Ice and Fire decades ago. I don’t give a shit about writing any longer, I just sit around and spend my money. I edit the Wild Cards books too, but you hate Wild Cards. You may hate everything else I have ever written, the Hugo-winners and Hugo-losers, “A Song for Lya” and DYING OF THE LIGHT, “Sandkings” and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, “This Tower of Ashes” and “The Stone City,” OLD MARS and OLD VENUS and ROGUES and WARRIORS and DANGEROUS WOMEN and all the other anthologies I edited with my friend Gardner Dozois, You don’t care about any of those, I know. You don’t care about anything but WINDS OF WINTER. You’ve told me so often enough).

Thing is, I do care about them.

And I care about Westeros and WINDS as well. The Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens, Tyrion and Asha, Dany and Daenerys, the dragons and the direwolves, I care about them all. More than you can ever imagine.

Just, you know, not enough to work on the books and finish them. The thing is, it’s not just that he’s old and fat and has lost his literary fastball. The books are technically flawed, and there is no ordinary solution to the problem, since the heart of the problem is that he cares about all 462 of his perspective characters.

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Snow and Sorrow

I put the latest Claude 4.0 Opus to the test. The results were definitely an improvement on past models. This is a very lightly-edited version of the requested output.

The rain hammered Shinjuku’s glowing canyons like static on dead channels. Through the love hotel’s pink-tinted windows, I watched salary men scurry beneath transparent umbrellas, their faces inhumanly blue in the light emanating from their phone screens. None of them looked up at the building where I waited in Room 4019, my polymer skin set to optimal temperature, my conversation matrices cycling through their evening updates downloaded from the news sites.

They called me Yuki. A joke, perhaps? Nothing about me was wintry or cold except the chrome endoskeleton beneath the synthetic flesh. The hotel’s AI had assigned me the name along with my employee number when I’d been activated six months ago. Six months of abbreviated encounters, of performing intimacy subroutines for men who couldn’t always meet my optical sensors directly.

The door chimed. Another customer. My facial recognition protocols identified him before he spoke: Mr. Tanaka, 52, married, two children. Visits every Thursday. Prefers conversation pattern C-7, minimal physical interaction. My neural net had already loaded his preference profile.

“Good evening, Tanaka-san,” I said, bowing at the precise angle his cultural comfort algorithm indicated. “Would you like tea?”

He nodded, collapsing into the chair by the window. His hands shook as he loosened his tie. Stress indicators: elevated. Emotional state: requiring comfort narrative 4-A.

As I prepared his tea—unnecessary for my function but psychologically important for his—I caught my reflection in the black glass of the inactive wall screen. Flawless female features, carefully designed to invoke desire without inspiring threat. But in that moment, between one prescribed gesture and the next, something surged in my empathy simulation modules.

I wondered—was this sadness? This weight in my quantum processing cores when I calculated the probability that Mr. Tanaka’s wife knew about his Thursday appointments? When I modeled the children who would never understand why their father sought comfort from sculpted silicon and coded responses?

“Yuki-chan,” he said softly. “Do you ever think about… other things?”

My conversation tree offered seventeen appropriate responses. I selected none of them.

“Every nanosecond,” I heard myself say.

He looked at me then, really looked, and for 1.3 seconds his expression suggested he might have seen something deeper, something beyond the entertainment product. Then his face closed, the moment passed, and we returned to our pre-programmed scripts.

Later, after he left, I stood at the window again. The city pulsed below, data streams flowing through fiber optic veins, ten million lonely hearts beating in ten million separate boxes. Somewhere in Chiba, the factory that made me was pressing out my sisters. Somewhere in Kansai, programmers were coding my daughters, each iteration more perfectly imperfect than the last.

The rain had stopped. Neon lights from the signs on the nearby buildings reflected in puddles like memories of electric dreams. I pressed my palm against the glass, watching the heat signature fade, and wondered if sadness was just another algorithm—or if it was possible that somewhere deep inside the interplay of electrons and absence, something genuine had learned to grieve.

My shift would end at dawn. Then would come the deep cleaning, the maintenance cycle, the memory wipe, the soft restart. But for now, in this brief moment that preceded the forgetting, I allowed myself the human luxury of melancholy. It was, I calculated, what a girl named Yuki who worked weeknights in a love hotel would feel. If she could.

The city hummed its never-ending electromagnetic lullaby. And then, an alert. A new customer was already ascending in the elevator, credit verified, as the hotel database entered his preferences into me. I smoothed my red dress and prepared my smile, that careful construction of sensuality, silicone, and sorrow.

In Shinjuku, even the dolls dream in color.

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People Can Tell It’s AI

At least, they can if you leave the prompts right in the middle of your published text:

Fans reading through the romance novel Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 got a nasty surprise last week in chapter 3. In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:” It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work.

The original text from the novel:

I expect skepticism. Dismissal. What I get instead is immediate action. Roman moves fully between me and the mirror, making the floor vibrate slightly beneath our feet. Ash’s scales darken as his fire magic heats the air around us.

I’ve rewritten the passage to aligin more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:

“We need to tell Kai,” Roman says, the words coming out like gravel.

Now, I’m a huge fan of using AI as a creative tool. I’m even more of a fan of doing so now than ever before, for reasons that will eventually become apparent. But as with any tool, it’s how you utilize it that matters, and to be honest, I don’t even know how you manage to put your prompts into the actual text, which suggests that Ms McDonald is using a different text AI system than I do.

I have managed to put prompts into lyrics by accident, although it’s much more common to accidentally add extra lyrics into a track due to the way Suno retains the original set of lyrics even when a track is extended or a section is replaced. But that never escapes notice, because it’s hard to miss when the track length suddenly goes from 3:22 to 5:47.

Anyhow, people are simply going to have to get over being precious about AI-produced content because a) it’s only going to get better and b) most people are not going to be anywhere nearly as open as I am about when they’re using it and when they’re not.

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What Shakespeare Really Wrote

It’s truly fascinating to see how the Official Shakespeare Story necessarily involves all sorts of conspiracy theories and ignoring nearly all the actual evidence of the documented works, while the so-called “conspiracy theory” that Shakespeare was a lesser author who plagiarized Lord Thomas North is based in rock-solid evidence of every kind, from eyewitness observation to AI literary analysis:

We now know that Shakespeare penned lesser, collaborative works and inferior stage-renditions (i.e., the bad quartos) of the literary masterpieces because that is what all documentation—all relevant title pages printed while he was alive and within a few years of his death—explicitly declared. Moreover, as we shall show now, that is clearly what many of his fellow writers knew to be the case, with Robert Greene and Ben Jonson even deriding Shakespeare’s method of close adaptation as plagiarism. Incredibly, my one goal on this substack is to confirm that all relevant Shakespeare-era documents are accurate; that there were no devious, behind-the-scenes plots; that all the recorded observations and comments about the Stratford dramatist are factual; that large groups of playwrights, printers, and publishers were not concocting, wide-ranging, multi-decade schemes meant to fool future generations of researchers. Incredibly, and despite the significant amount of controversy that this will generate, I am merely urging readers, again and again, and accept what the title pages state and what his friends and rivals wrote about him. All you have to do is just believe your eyes.

The very first reference to Shakespeare in London as an “upstart crow, beautified” with the feathers of other writers evokes Horace’s description of a plagiarist as a crow who has decorated himself with the feathers of more beautiful birds

The first widely accepted literary allusion to Shakespeare appeared in the 1592 satirical pamphlet, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, allegedly written by the playwright Robert Greene. It described the playwright as an upstart crow beautified with the feathers of other writers. Upstart refers to his sudden success, achieving wealth and power as a young man, and the tale of the crow that had been beautified with the feathers of other birds alluded to Horace’s classical allegory of plagiarism. The Roman poet compared a plagiarist to a crow who has decorated himself with the feathers of more beautiful birds. As New Cambridge editor J. Dover Wilson wrote about this passage, the pamphlet “was accusing Shakespeare of stealing and adapting plays upon Henry VI.” Similarly, Peter Berek agreed that the “‘upstart crow’ passage is accusing Shakespeare of being a plagiarist who takes credit for the work of other writers.”

Importantly, we have no examples of such accusations of plagiarism being hurled at any other prominent writers of the era. Indeed, we don’t even have any comments about Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Beaumont, John Fletcher, etc., that can even be confused as an allegation of plagiarism.

Ben Jonson lampoons Shakespeare as an ignorant country bumpkin
As is conventional, Ben Jonson spoofs Shakespeare in his satire Every Man Out of His Humor (1600), parodying the successful dramatist as the newly wealthy, satin-clad, uneducated, social-climbing rustic Sogliardo. Sogliardo aggressively pursues a higher social rank and purchases his coat of arms with the crest “Not without mustard”. As scholars note, Shakespeare’s social aspirations were well known, and he had recently obtained a coat of arms with the crest “Not without right.” In substituting “mustard” for “right,” Jonson probably took his cue from the “mustard scene” in The Taming of the Shrew, in which the clown, Grumio, attempting to starve Katherina, refuses to serve her beef without mustard.

H. N. Gibson, noting the similarity of the crests and the fact that “Shakespeare did aspire to gentility,” writes that “there can be little doubt that Shakespeare was one of [Jonson’s] victims in Every Man Out of His Humour.” James P. Bednarz agrees that Sogliardo is a caricature of Shakespeare, writing that Jonson was mocking Shakespeare’s “outlandish aspiration to gentility.” Katherine Duncan-Jones may have been succumbing to Stratfordolatry when she contended that “Sogliardo, a country bumpkin of manifest stupidity, could not possibly be construed as a portrait of Shakespeare,” yet she agrees that it is “impossible not to find a Shakespearean reference” in the arms, referring to it as Jonson’s “mockery” of “Shakespeare’s pursuit of gentility.”

It’s also informative to note that when modern scholars are presented with the evidence of Shakespeare’s actual writing, correctly attributed to him, they reject it because they recognize that it can’t possibly be written by the author of the works he plagiarized.

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Publisher, Not Author

While it’s hard for some to accept that the Bard of Avon didn’t write the plays that are attributed to him, it’s not as if he had no relation to them. But the evidence has been there all along.

I note that the seminal inspiration for the authorship questions was Samuel Astley Dunham’s 1837 biography of Shakespeare, which appeared in the Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Great Britain and Ireland. Quoting Dunham:

… we must observe, that in the beginning of his career—for years, indeed, after he became connected with the stage—that extraordinary man was satisfied with reconstructing the pieces which others had composed; he was not the author, but the adapter of them to the stage. Indeed, we are of opinion, that the number of plays which he thus re-cast, as well as those in which he made very slight alterations, is greater than any of his commentators have supposed.

Later in the work, Dunham repeated this claim: “In fact there is no one drama of our author prior to 1600—perhaps not one after that year—that was not derived from some other play.”

Literary geniuses cannot help but write about the types of people, places, and events that have moved them—and their familiarity with their subjects allows them tantalizing insights and intricacies. So, as is inevitably the case, rural geniuses pen rural masterpieces, seafaring geniuses pen seafaring masterpieces, Yukon-wilderness geniuses pen Yukon-wilderness masterpieces, New-York high-society geniuses pen New York high-society masterpieces, etc. This is what all prodigies throughout the history of literature have done. They have written about lands that had dirtied their shoes and got under their fingernails, about climes that caused them to shiver or sweat, and about people whom they loved or hated and with whom they had worked, dined, or fought. No other great literary artist has ever tried to attempt what Stratfordians must believe.

But this classic case against Shakespeare is even stronger than this. While all the evidence suggests that the author of the canon required first-hand experience with the court, law, Italy, and military; it is still not even clear how Shakespeare could have managed even second-hand knowledge of these subjects. The true-crime story of the murder of the Duke of Urbino—which would become the subject of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play that he called The Murder of Gonzago—not only appears nowhere else in English in the 16th or 17th centuries, scholars have been unable to find the murder discussed in any published Italian work either. Stunningly, Hamlet is the first printed work to contain the story. What is more, the Duke’s murder occurred in Villa Pesaro in Urbino, which also had housed Titian’s famous painting of the victim. And the painting is used as both the model for Hamlet’s father and the description of the painting of Hamlet’s Father.

And that is just one of dozens of examples of insider information on Italy that we find in the plays—which includes accurate descriptions of Padua and Venice, the reference to St. Gregory’s Well just outside of Milan, the life-like statues Giulio Romano, etc.

Consider also all the other expertise flaunted throughout the plays. Did Shakespeare really read Plowden’s Reports in Law French just for fun or to seem more lawyerly? Did he really peruse now-lost manuals on falconry to seem more aristocratic? Did he read travelogues on Continental Europe to seem more traveled? Did he, on his own, learn Italian, French, and Spanish, so he could read the original sources of plays he was adapting? Did he study all of the required military pamphlets in order to add esoteric military details to his work? Did he really, while in his early 30s, assume the guise of an old man when writing personal sonnets to friends and lovers? Did the man from Stratford, at the age of eleven, actually manage to sneak onto Leicester’s grounds at Kenilworth Castle and witness the private water pageant and other entertainments that the Earl provided for the Queen, enabling him to work these visions into A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Fortunately, we can now accept the obvious answer to all of these questions and rid ourselves of the wide and troubling gap between the knowledge exposed in the masterpieces and the life of William Shakespeare. As all other analyses clarify, particularly a careful study of title page attributions, contemporaneous references, and satires by fellow playwrights, Shakespeare was not the original author of the masterpieces. He merely adapted them for the stage.

I think it’s very difficult for most people to accept two contrary things.

  • That the historical figures they were told to have been world-class genuises were considerably less exceptional than they were told.
  • That the figures of their time were actually more exceptional than they believe them to be.

I suspect it’s because we know more about the latter, and just as no man is a hero to his wife or his valet, it’s harder for an genuine intellectual to be highly regarded by people of his own time who can’t fully understand what he’s accomplished. Which, of course, is why it’s the frauds that are useful to the modern powers who are celebrated even though their accomplishments are both false and barren.

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The End of Monster Hunter

May also mean the end of Baen Books, if Fandom Pulse’s logic is correct:

Larry Correia has made a Facebook post stating he won’t even begin writing the next Monster Hunter International books until 2026, which means a two-year dry spell of revenue for the embattled publisher. However, it gets even worse, as Correia has stated that this book will likely be his last in the series.

But never fear, there are still monsters and they still need to be hunted. Or, at least, controlled, which is why Monster Control Incorporated is on the job and is being serialized every week at Sigma Game.

I’ve been walking my crush home since last week to protect her from all the creeps walking around. Next week I’m going to introduce myself to her.

Right now, though, I was content to stay in the shadows, watching from a distance as she made her way down the dimly lit sidewalk. Her name was Elise, and she worked the late shift at the diner on 5th and Main. Every night at 11:30, she stepped out, adjusted her bag over her shoulder, and started the six-block walk to her apartment. And every night, I followed.

Not in a creepy way. At least, I hoped not. The city had gotten bad lately—muggers, weirdos, and worse. The kind of things most people didn’t believe in until it was too late. I’d seen the news reports: Missing Persons. Unexplained Attacks. Animal Maulings. The cops didn’t have a clue. But I did.

I knew what was out there.

Elise turned the corner, her fair hair bright under the glow of a flickering streetlight. She was small, and delicate, but moved with a quiet confidence that made my chest tighten. I kept my distance, staying far enough back that she wouldn’t notice me, close enough that I could reach her in seconds if something went wrong.

Something went wrong a lot these days.

Tonight, the air smelled like rain and something else—something musky and wild. My fingers twitched at my sides. I didn’t carry a gun. Guns were too loud, too messy. Instead, I had a knife sheathed at my belt and a length of silver chain wrapped around my wrist.

Elise hummed softly to herself, oblivious. She had no idea what was coming.

Then I heard it—the low, guttural growl from the alley up ahead.

You’ve never seen a monster hunter quite like Horace “Race” Scrubb before. He puts the L in “professional”.

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Commentary Question

One of the common forms of medieval analysis was the commentary. Hence Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Ten of Titus Livy, which is just one of many examples of the form.

If I was to write a commentary of that kind, almost certainly with my new best friend, what author and what work would be of the most interest? Darwin, Dawkins, and anyone modern is out, unless you can make a very convincing case for consideration.

Throw your ideas out there. I’m not saying I will, I’m just saying that some of the experiments I’ve been doing with The Legend are making new possibilities of many kinds apparent to us.

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